NetBSD running on OpenRISK 1000 CPUs
Matt Thomas
posted
that he has updated the NetBSD toolchain and build system to
build the userland for the OpenRISK 1000 CPU,
and will work on the kernel next.
From
Wikipedia:
``OpenRISC is the original flagship project of the OpenCores community. This project aims to develop a series of general purpose open source RISC CPU architectures. The first (and currently only) architectural description is for the OpenRISC 1000, describing a family of 32 and 64-bit processors with optional floating point and vector processing support.''

Throttling the CPU to reduce fan noise
On netbsd-users, Cem Kayali has
posted a script to adjust the CPU frequency according to the system temperature,
and thus reduce fan noise. This is different from pkgsrc's estd,
which just adjusts the CPU speed according to the system load, so
it's quite the contrary. Cem uses the envstat(4) framework to
determine CPU temperature, and then slows the CPU down with sysctl(1).

An alternative approach was
suggested by Jeremy Reed,
which hints at the powerd(8) script hooks that can be set to
act on corresponting ACPI Thermal Zone (acpitz) events.
See
Jeremy Reed's blog posting
for a few more ideas, plus a hint that this may become
documented even better in the future.